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It’s managed by me (Suphatra) and I’m a real person, not a robot. I work on the Teams team and sit in engineering, and its my job to represent your voice in the design and development of this product.

Here’s how to get your voice heard:

1 — VOTE for existing ideas (this will also subscribe you to the idea’s status updates)
2 — SUBMIT new ideas (any duplications are merged together)
3 — RATE the product by clicking the little orange star on this page. This helps us understand our overall standing with users. It will collect your rating every six weeks.
4 — COMMENT in ideas’ threads, which I check religiously!

I really like Teams. I do. But the current chat layout is not suited for professional chats. It's way to space consuming. It looks like something imported from MSN with smiley's that take half of the screen. I would say that Slack have nailed it because they focused on the ability keeping a tight window with lots of chat text visible. In Teams the window is full and starts scrolling after like 10 sentences.

We want to extend a huge thanks to all of you who have engaged with us on this topic of compact chat. Your input has been invaluable and helped inform our design and decision-making.

As we look to 2019, we will be pursuing plans to continue to make the product more and more space efficient. We see this as a guiding design principle, as well as a backlog of requests from UserVoice that we catalogue, discuss, debate, brainstorm and problem solve.

This principle is also why we will not be making a sharp design turn towards a permanently heavy dense design. Our user base is a wide range of people — such as high school students, the visually impaired, open source developers, and your every day knowledge worker. Because of our broad reach, we must maintain a standard of usability that meets many visual needs.

Lastly, we are seriously considering a compact mode. This would be an option — a switch, you might say — that makes everything quite dense. We are entering a new phase of product development that makes this more possible than before. To that end, I’m changing the title of this request to “Compact Mode.” We’ll keep you abreast of these plans as we learn more ourselves.

Meanwhile, we really appreciate your patience, your feedback, and your support of Teams. Thank you for being part of #MicrosoftTeams!

Sincerely,
Suphatra

Hi everyone, thank you for your patience since the last update.

We want to extend a huge thanks to all of you who have engaged with us on this topic of compact chat. Your input has been invaluable and helped inform our design and decision-making.

As we look to 2019, we will be pursuing plans to continue to make the product more and more space efficient. We see this as a guiding design principle, as well as a backlog of requests from UserVoice that we catalogue, discuss, debate, brainstorm and problem solve.

This principle is also why we will not be making a sharp design turn towards a permanently heavy dense design. Our user base is a wide range of people — such as high school students, the visually impaired, open source developers, and your every day knowledge worker. Because of our broad reach, we must maintain a standard of…

There is no reason that Teams and Chat should be different top level categories in the left navigation. They are the same thing, perform exactly the same function, and making two different items simply confuses the navigation and makes badge notifications and discoverability much more difficult to use.

Please combine Chats into the Teams tab so that you can browse all conversations in one place rather than needing to navigate to different tabs to see different conversations.

Chats and channels perform essentially the same function, which is talk to some people and collaborate. Forcing the user to check two different lists to see if somebody is messaging them is a really bad experience, it is like having two different chat apps.

This is one usability issues that makes Teams less usable for collaboration than both Slack and Skype.

There is no reason that Teams and Chat should be different top level categories in the left navigation. They are the same thing, perform exactly the same function, and making two different items simply confuses the navigation and makes badge notifications and discoverability much more difficult to use.

Please combine Chats into the Teams tab so that you can browse all conversations in one place rather than needing to navigate to different tabs to see different conversations.

Chats and channels perform essentially the same function, which is talk to some people and collaborate. Forcing the user to check two different…

Many people like to use English as their display language, but get confused with the US date format: 11/06 is October 6 in the US, but June 11 in many other countries. Why not display the date according to the setting in Windows?

Same goes for time, of course, where many use 24 hour format instead of am and pm.

The far left navigation panel seems to have a whole lot of blank space just calling out to be filled with things, and there is plenty of functionality within Teams that could be put there so users could reach it faster. That big gap between Files and Feedback is wasted space!

You should let individual users decide what goes in this space by giving them the ability to pin additional things they want there. I use the 'Saved' functionality a lot for example. It would be nice to have it out there only one click away. Perhaps I think a certain person, bot, or channel is important enough to deserve placement out there. Or how about a certain Tab somewhere.

Give the user the choice and allow them to make Teams their own!

The far left navigation panel seems to have a whole lot of blank space just calling out to be filled with things, and there is plenty of functionality within Teams that could be put there so users could reach it faster. That big gap between Files and Feedback is wasted space!

You should let individual users decide what goes in this space by giving them the ability to pin additional things they want there. I use the 'Saved' functionality a lot for example. It would be nice to have it out there only one click away. Perhaps I think a…

We will not be doing this request at this time, due to other high priority engineering that the product needs. But we really appreciate the feedback and are listening to every one that you submit in this forum. Thank you!

Dear Admins, please get on the same page as your design teams and support staff, they’re giving users contradicting information.

I just had a conversation with Microsoft Support about the ability for a Skype user to talk to a Teams user…basically at this time there is no such thing as interoperability despite their documentation regarding coexistence modes.

The very minute a user even tries Teams just once…they break the ability to use Skype to talk to you if you’re using Teams. Apparently it’s been in this broken state for months and is “by design.”

Here’s the quote from the rep, “Teams is designed to only send messages to Skype for Business if the recipient has NEVER used Teams. Once the recipient like USER B has signed into Teams (even just once), all messages from other Teams user like USER A, would ONLY be sent to Teams.”

The support rep even admitted Microsoft’s documentation does not match this current broken system. There is no actual migration path from Skype to Teams, there is no actual interoperability. If you have a 1,000 users and just one tried out Teams then you have to decide either everyone uses Skype or everyone uses Teams, nothing in between.

It’s crazy but the truth is you can safely disregard everything in this article: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/tea..

I’m desperately trying to keep Slack at bay in my organization, but this just gives Slack users more ammunition.

Microsoft, please get it together and provide us true interoperability that matches up with your documentation.

Dear Admins, please get on the same page as your design teams and support staff, they’re giving users contradicting information.

I just had a conversation with Microsoft Support about the ability for a Skype user to talk to a Teams user…basically at this time there is no such thing as interoperability despite their documentation regarding coexistence modes.

The very minute a user even tries Teams just once…they break the ability to use Skype to talk to you if you’re using Teams. Apparently it’s been in this broken state for months and is “by design.”

During testing of Teams app we found that users are quite often confused in regards to which team they are posting (specifically when they post to 'general' channel) - I think ability to assign different colors for different teams (by the owners/admins) would be helpful and could help to reduce amount of mistakes.

Could we get an option to have conversations start up in a separate window, rather than attached to the main Teams window? Then you could close that window when you are done and the main window would be much more compact. Kind of like SFB is designed.